Talk:Ultima II: The Revenge of the Enchantress

Removed sections likely to be copyright violations.
Hello!

The section "story" and one sentence from the introduction are taken directly from the documentation of some later Ultima game, unless my memory is quite mixed up. So I removed them. Please feel free to revert if you believe this to be mistaken. -- 77.7.134.150 18:13, 4 June 2007 (UTC)

Why have the Mobygames link ?
What does this entry add to the article? What information isn't already in the article that you could get at the short article on that site? Anyone can submit or edit information there. I don't believe a lot of fact checking goes on there.  D r e a m Focus  13:41, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * 11 covers, 109 screenshots, credits. Enough? Also, there is even a special Wikipedia template to add MB everywhere (just like the films have a Wikipedia template for the IMDb). --Niemti (talk) 13:52, 8 June 2012 (UTC)


 * Screenshots, yes. Good reason then.  Nothing else there worth seeing.  My mistake.  I found reading the back of the covers for different versions amusing.  I don't remember the part of the game where you could be seduced in a bar, meet prominent peope within the computer industry, hijack airplanes, or be chased by KGB agents.  Been awhile since I played it though.   D r e a m Focus  18:09, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

External links modified (January 2018)
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Plot
There are a few issues with plot that tend toward the subjective, warranting another look (this being, as we all know, an encyclopedic source rather than a work of fiction).

"The war against Minax's vile legions is long and hard..."

They're not particularly vile, it's not really a war, and it's certainly neither long nor hard. The minions are static, easily beaten, and in a short amount of time. And there's not really enough to call them a "legion" nor this a "war".

"...but eventually the hero hunts down the sorceress to the Time of Legends, pursues her as she teleports throughout the castle, and destroys her with the quicksword Enilno (online backwards)."

What Enilno is, spelled backwards, is largely irrelevant to the description of the game. There are many names throughout the Ultima series that are backwards-spellings of other words. Maybe if there were a separate Wikipedia entry on Enilno itself...? Otherwise at least this needs some statement of relevance.

"It's interesting to note that this game is set on Earth...."

"Interesting" is subjective. Interesting to whom? The reader? This whole article is by definition interesting to them, because they're reading it on purpose. Otherwise they would have clicked away.... Otherwise, this sentence serves little to no purpose.

Food for thought. Any other input? Scottman 01 (talk) 19:04, 12 April 2018 (UTC)
 * There has been no discussion for the past two weeks. Are these reasonable changes? Scottman 01 (talk) 18:16, 26 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I agree there are problems. Need to change that.  I just did some editing.  Online spelled backwards because it was published by Sierra Online.  They were named On-Line Systems from 1979 to 1980 and then Sierra On-Line from 1980 to 2002.  Not sure if that's relevant in any way.  In Ultima 7 he made the three symbols of evil the symbols the current publisher of EA used in their logo, and other references to them.   D r e a m Focus  19:14, 26 April 2018 (UTC)

map
Later production runs of the game featured a much smaller box and a lighter weight map.[citation needed]
 * I search Google images for "Ultima 2 cloth map" and I see someone has two maps side by side at and mentioning one is thicker and paler and the other thinner and darker.  Google images show there are different boxes, but no idea if one was smaller than the others.  There was a lighter weight map though.   D r e a m Focus  13:20, 28 April 2018 (UTC)
 * I've personally seen and handled the large and regular-sized boxes and maps, but yes, an online source for this would be good. Scottman 01 (talk) 18:32, 29 April 2018 (UTC)

Development and Versions
"The C64 port was apparently released before the programmer (credited only as "Bobbit") could finish. As a consequence, it is missing some gameplay elements and also has a simplified title screen with text characters instead of the dragon graphic on other versions."

The lack of dragon graphic is clear, but I'm curious about the missing gameplay elements. I've completed Ultima II dozens of times on the C-64, several times on the PC, and a few times on the Apple II, and the gameplay is identical across all three systems. If there's something I'm missing, I'd be interested in the source of this claim.... Scottman 01 (talk) 11:47, 1 May 2018 (UTC)

Correct Date of Publication?
According to this article, Ultima II was released August 24, 1982. However, it is not clear to me where that information derives from (it seems to be cited to the game itself, but games do not tend to carry their own month and day of publication, only year). This information is also fairly heavily contradicted in Levy's account in Hackers, in which he details the Mark Duchaineau "held the game hostage" (i.e. prevented it from being released) over the weeekend of the 1982 San Francisco Applefest (see pgs 374-383 in the 1994 10th anniversary re-issue of Hackers). Levy does not give the date of the 1982 SF Applefest, but I've located it to Nov 18-21, 1982, based on an ad in the San Francisco examiner, Nov. 16, 1982 p. 56. According to Levy's account, Ultima II was released after Applefest (consistent with the fact that the reviews for the game mostly fell btw Dec 1982 and March 1983), and therefore couldn't have been released for the Apple II in August. I'm not making a move to change anything yet, but wanted others to have a chance to weight in/see if an accurate source could be found. Sierra OffLine (talk) 15:17, 26 October 2018 (UTC)

Errata
The first screenshot represents the IBM PC port with CGA graphics when viewed on an RGBI monitor, or when playing with an EGA or VGA graphics card. The graphics were clearly designed to be displayed on a CGA Composite Color monitor, on which the pink-speckled water becomes blue, as in the Apple II version. In fact, the Color Graphics Adapter article even shows this very game as an example of CGA Composite Color graphics. Therefore, the screenshot does not represent the PC port as it was intended by the author of the port to be seen. Since the game originally was made for the Apple II platform, a screenshot of the Apple II version would be much more representative of the game.

It was also the only official Ultima game published by Sierra On-Line. No, the Atari 8-bit port of Ultima I was published by Sierra On-Line as well.

Modern (too fast) computers also generate a divide by zero error when attempting to run the game. Not entirely correct (see below), and the "Divide Error" problem appears twice in the article. I suggest moving all PC-related information beyond the mere statement that the game was re-released on CD-ROM, including bugs, missing files and fan patches, to below the "PC compatibles" subheading.

The IBM version of Ultima II is a DOS game and does not run off a self-booting disk, which was unusual for a game released in 1983. Not completely wrong, but incomplete and therefore misleading. The original IBM version's Reference Card advises the user to optionally use the SYS command to transfer DOS to the game disk to make it bootable. This process was quite common for both PC games and applications released in the early 1980s, and was necessitated by IBM not allowing the DOS system files to be redistributed. I suggest removing this sentence completely, since it adds little relevant information, and would require too much digression to become entirely accurate.

It supports only CGA graphics ... that only display correctly on an IBM CGA with a Composite Color monitor or TV, not an RGBI monitor, not on EGA and VGA, and not on Tandy 1000 and IBM PCjr. Sierra did release a rare special IBM PCjr version of the game that alters the graphical patterns to display correctly on an IBM PCjr connected to a Composite Color monitor or TV. These facts are crucial, in my opinion, to not having modern players get the wrong impression about the "ugly-looking" PC port.

and PC speaker sound This is not idiosyncratic to the PC version, but true for the original Apple II version as well.

and also uses the CPU for timing, hence it will run too fast on anything except an 8088 PC. The PC port is also prone to generating divide by zero errors and crashing to the DOS prompt. Not true for all versions of the PC port. The 1989 Ultima I-III Trilogy and the Ultima I-VI CD-ROM version measure the CPU speed and adjust themselves accordingly, but only up to the speed of about a 386. On faster systems, it is precisely that CPU speed measurement that causes the "Divide Error". The Sierra On-Line version never had that speed measurement, and the Ultima Collection version patches it out. As a result, the latter two versions only run at the correct speed on a 4.77 MHz PC/XT, but for different reasons, and do not suffer from the "Divide Error" problem.

Ultima II is designed for DOS 1.x and does not support subdirectories, so save games must be in the same directory as the game files. Many games that require DOS 2.0+, including Ultimas IV and V, do not support putting "save games" (meaning the content of the Player Disk) into subdirectories either, so the statement is a bit misleading. The actual problem is that some files exist with the same name but different content on different disks, causing lost content when copied into the same hard disk directly. This problem is actually the cause of the missing Galactic map files mentioned earlier in the article, and is corrected by the fan patch not by way of subdirectories, but by way of just giving the Galactic map files unique names.

Ultima II was the first game in the series officially ported to platforms other than the Apple II. No, Ultima I was ported to Atari 8-bit. Or is the idea of the statement that the Ultima II ports came earlier than the Atari 8-bit Ultima I port? — Preceding unsigned comment added by NewRisingSun (talk • contribs)


 * Good points. Anyone can edit the article and fix the mistakes.   D r e a m Focus  18:06, 12 January 2021 (UTC)